Automatic banking machines, commonly known as ATM's (automatic terminal machine), are now an accepted way of performing many personal banking financial transactions. There are many reasons advanced for this change from conventional banking for completing financial transactions to the use of automatic banking machines. One of the more significant advantages is its availability on a 24-hour basis, thus providing banking services to a customer at the customer's convenience. The convenience of 24-hour availability, as well as the ability of being operated at numerous locations, where such service would not otherwise be feasible, is possible because such machines are self-operated in that they function on the command of the customer. Because such banking machines are "self-operating", a system must be accurate, substantially error free, reliable, and capable of dispensing bank notes upon command by the customer in a convenient form and in quantities selected by the customer.
With the increased use of automatic banking machines it has become evident that the reliability of such machines is of importance for customer acceptance, particularly when the dispenser is self-operating and unattended in any direct manner. Considerable customer inconvenience may result if a banking machine fails to operate upon the presentation of a customer identification card as a result of the malfunctioning of the system.
It is also important from the operator's (e.g. a bank) point of view that only the correct quantity of bank notes should be delivered to the customer for such automatic banking machines to be acceptable. A banking machine dispensing bank notes must operate to minimize the possibility of delivering more notes to the customer than selected. Some prior art automatic banking machines utilized a "fail safe" operation that shut down the machine upon the detection of a malfunction, such as a bank note misfeed, but such a solution causes obvious inconvenience and loss of service of the machine.
Other prior art automatic banking machines dispense bank notes in selected quantities to a drawer which is subsequently opened to the customer to permit withdrawal of the bank notes. These systems permitted selected withdrawal of varied amounts of bank notes. Once a note is dispensed from a storage bin into the drawer there is no means of retracting the note when an error in dispensing has been made. Such machines require the "fail safe" operation as mentioned previously. Other automatic banking machines provide for the successive counting out of bank notes from a storage bin directly to a customer. The present invention will be described with reference to this type of automatic banking machine although the document dispenser to be described also finds utility when delivering individual bank notes successively to an escrow station. An automatic banking machine with an escrow station operates to deliver bank notes from a storage bin to the escrow station. All bills in the escrow station are then delivered as a bundle to a customer when the correct number has been assembled in escrow.